Going West

“Going West” explores the potential of integrating East European History into broader histories of Europe and the world. Placing the history of Eastern Europe in a European context, I argue, may enable us to challenge the tropes of backwardness, pathology, and violence that still dominate the field. I also suggest that historians explore the extent to which conceptions of minority rights, development, and humanitarianism first developed in Eastern Europe radiated beyond the region in the twentieth century.

I n the spring of 2010, the Centre Pompidou in Paris mounted an exhibit called "The Promises of the Past: a Discontinuous History of art in ex-eastern europe." The exhibit's title, along with its stated goal to interrogate "the former opposition between eastern and Western europe," is typical of a trend to depict eastern europe itself as a historical artifact. aside from the promise of the past, it visualized some of the promises and pitfalls of efforts to integrate eastern europe into more general narratives of european history.
On the one hand, the exhibit made a laudable attempt to demonstrate that east european artists participated in the broader artistic movements of the late twentieth century. Simultaneously, however, the Pompidou exhibit reframed many old clichés about east european history with good intentions. Visitors could easily have left the museum with the impression that all east european artists were heroic dissidents. The visual images that confronted visitors often spoke louder than the catalogue. Just as the wealth and beauty of Paris was framed for visitors in the panoramic windows of the Pompidou, the eastern europe on display was a panorama of urban blight-gray, drab, and dismal.
The point of this anecdote is not to rehearse the history of eastern europe's contested boundaries but to raise the question of whether it is possible or desirable to write as a historian of europe rather than "eastern europe." 1 The institutions that fund historians of eastern europe are themselves schizophrenic on the question of whether east european history exists as a separate field and how the boundaries of europe and "eastern europe" should be defined. Title VIII funding was briefly denied to scholars working on countries that had joined the european Union. Then the east suddenly expanded again. For the moment, historians of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Slovakia belong to the "east european Studies" club once again. 786 east european Politics and Societies ambiguity about the definition of eastern europe is not confined to funding agencies, and there are deeper intellectual issues as stake. In part, this is because the field is still so often defined in terms of pathology as much as geography. Few east europeanists are inclined to tell the old stories of pathological backwardness and ethnic conflict, and many claim to be suffering from nationalism fatigue. But pathology sells-to students, publishers, conference organizers, and granting agencies. Talking about pathology and violence is often a ticket to entry into broader conversations outside our field. The field's preoccupation with violence and politics partly explains the relative poverty of gender and cultural history in the field (though it doesn't need to, since gender and culture are also central to the history of violence, dictatorship, and ethnic conflict). 2 east europeanists are understandably obsessed with politics, and until recently, they have defined politics in rather narrow terms.
escaping the pathology paradigm does not require trying to prove that eastern europe was as "modern," developed, or democratic as the West, however. This approach plays right into the old frameworks in which "democracy," "liberalism," and "modernity" are defined as static, ideal types. 3 I have found it more helpful to use comparative and transnational studies to highlight connections and similarities between east and West. Western and east european societies alike faced the challenges of democracy, development, and "managing" diverse populations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. and West european nation-states and empires did not necessarily deal with these challenges with any less conflict or violence. It is striking that while historians of France, great Britain, and germany have increasingly problematized the history of diversity in Western europe, through studies of empire and race, historians of Habsburg Central europe have rather tended to de-problematize diversity in recent years. 4 I recently completed a history of displacement and the family in postwar eastern and Western europe. World War II is the moment when even those most skeptical about assertions of east european difference are often inclined to draw the line. Millions of dead bodies quantify the many differences between east and West during the Second World War. But if we take a closer look at the efforts of europeans to reconstruct their societies in the aftermath of war, it becomes clear that european governments faced many shared challenges, and adopted similar solutions-in realms as diverse as migration and population policies, housing/architecture, restitution, family, and social welfare policies. There are shared histories buried under the rubble of cold war rhetoric; the precise dimensions and degree of consensus remain to be discovered. 5 To take one example, after World War II there was a widespread panic about the balance of population in europe. In the east, the problem was compounded by obscene casualty rates and the deportation and flight of millions of germans. But almost every european government was anxious to replace the human beings lost to battlefields, bombings, and murder-and to acquire the labor necessary for postwar reconstruction. Pro-natalism swept the continent. It animated new social welfare programs and even inspired competition to reclaim refugee children and orphans as immigrants. In 1946, Pierre Pfimlin, representing the French Ministry of Public Health and Population, actually described refugee children as a "blood transfusion" who could counter a "menace of extinction" that threatened the French nation: "During the war years germany was an immense prison, where humans belonging to all of the nations of europe rubbed shoulders. . . . This mixing of humans without historical precedent has left human traces-children were born. a lot of children. a good number of them have French blood in their veins. . . . From a demographic point of view the child is the ideal immigrant because he constitutes a human asset whose value is all the more certain since his assimilation is guaranteed. It is impossible to say the same of any adult immigrant." 6 We tend to associate the postwar period with closed borders in eastern europe and growing waves of migration in the west. But in 1946, that outcome was not obvious. even as they obsessed about creating nationally homogeneous states, governments in eastern and Western europe turned to similar (and familiar) sources to meet perceived labor and population needs. That year, for example, Czechoslovakia and Poland signed agreements with Italy to import tens of thousands of Italian workers to toil in mining, agriculture, and other industries, where they would fill in for missing germans. Presumably, these plans were interrupted by the Communist seizure of power, but it reminds us of relative openness of the years 1945 to 1948. 7 In both the west and east after World War II, moreover, population and migration policies were bent on the creation of homogeneous states. across the continent, national homogeneity was seen as the sole possible guarantee of national sovereignty and security, as well as a prerequisite for economic growth. This goal underpinned both the violent ethnic cleansing that swept eastern europe and the racially exclusive migration policies implemented in the west after World War II. great Britain, France, the United States, and other countries that received migrants after World War II all selected migrants based on their perceived ability to "assimilate" into racially or ethnically defined nation-states. 8 This does not mean we should simply reverse the east-West binaries that have traditionally structured the writing of history, however. It is tempting, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, to construct an equally distorted (and overly triumphant) narrative in which all of history leads up to european unification. But integrating the history of eastern europe into broader european histories may help to complicate or nuance established narratives of difference.
Historians with deep knowledge of various regional and local contexts in eastern europe also have a great deal to offer the field of european history as a whole. Instead of focusing on the impact of Russia or germany or the West on eastern europe, for example, we might think more about how eastern europe and east europeans have shaped the political culture of europe in general, as well as international institutions and norms. Larry Wolff, of course, did exactly this with Inventing Eastern Europe, showing how the idea of europe itself was constructed in relation to its perceived 788 east european Politics and Societies margins. 9 But a great deal of work remains to be done on the many political, social, and cultural practices and institutions that radiated outward from eastern europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Traces of east european conceptions of minority and national rights can still be found in international law and institutions, for example. Many standard histories of the twentieth century present 1945 as a radical breaking point, a moment when the collective, minority rights enshrined in the League of Nations and the post-World War I peace treaties were rejected in favor of more individualist ideals of human rights (at least in the West). 10 But upon closer examination, it appears that national, collective or minority rights-products of the cultural and legal traditions of the late Habsburg empire and interwar eastern europe-were actually integrated into emerging norms of human rights and international law after World War II.
One example of such continuities is the 20 percent threshold, the percentage of the population belonging to a minority group necessary for that group to obtain linguistic, educational, or political rights. This legal threshold, established by austrian courts and lawmakers, was subsequently incorporated into the 1918 Minorities Treaties and continued to reign in many parts of europe after World War I and II. 11 another example comes from the realm of humanitarian child saving. Between 1922 and 1927, a League of Nations' Commission for the Protection of Women and Children in the Near east was charged with "reclaiming" armenian children who had allegedly been forcibly denationalized or Islamicized in Turkish families or institutions during the genocide. This commission set the legal and ideological precedents for the United Nations' much more ambitious efforts to renationalize and repatriate east european children after World War II-in the name of democracy and human rights. 12 There were also human continuities. Raphael Lemkin is one of the most famous east europeans to shape the postwar international order. Thanks to Lemkin, the 1948 United Nation's Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide equated the denationalization of children with genocide. The Convention officially condemned "forcibly transferring children of one group to another group" enacted "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." That same year, the "right to a nationality" was enshrined in article 15 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, along with the principle that "no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality." Not surprisingly, Lemkin was a Polish Jew and a veteran of the bitter conflicts over minority rights in interwar Central europe. He emigrated to the United States in 1941 and began a lifelong crusade to strengthen international legal protections for minorities. 13 Lora Wildenthal's recent research has also shown the extent to which german expellees were central to the emergence of the field of international law and human rights in postwar germany. Rudolf Laun, a Bohemian legal scholar and expellee who wrote on nationality law in the late austrian empire, was a key figure here. Once again it is clear that for these german theorists, "human" rights had a collectivist underpinning. 14 It would also be interesting to know more about how minority policies in Palestine and Israel after World War II might have been shaped by the experiences of Habsburg and east european Jews who emigrated there. a second theme might be eastern europe as a laboratory for humanitarianism and development policies. Ludwik Rajchman, the Polish delegate to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation administration Council, was a founder of UNICeF. after World War II he spent his career applying public health measures pioneered in interwar and postwar Poland to children in the "developing" world. Several other major international relief and humanitarian efforts made their debut in Central and eastern europe after World War I: Herbert Hoover's american Relief administration, one of the first international efforts to prevent famine; the american Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; the Save the Children Fund; and the Oeuvre de Secours aux enfants. The field of development economics is itself a product of eastern europe. The pioneers in the field were émigré economists from Central europe such as Joseph Schumpeter, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, and Kurt Mandelbaum. They first turned their attention to the problems of industrialization, development, and reconstruction in eastern europedeveloping theories that would later be applied to other regions of the world in the aftermath of decolonization. 15 In the realm of family and social policies, meanwhile, it is clear that psychoanalytic theories born and developed in Vienna-but also in Prague and Budapest-became central to postwar ideas about child-rearing and selfhood in the West, in part through the emigration of Jewish refugees from east Central europe. International adoption was yet another legacy of the Second World War in eastern europe. after World War II, child welfare experts in the United Nations and the International Social Service (the first international social work organization) promoted new international regulations for transferring children across borders, based on their experiences with the adoption of east european and german refugee children after World War II. These standards continue to inform the practice of international adoption today. Controversies continue to rage over the transfer of children across cultural and national boundaries. and in these debates the threat of "denationalization" invoked by east european governments after World War II continues to represent a central argument against international adoption. 16 Migration was key to all of these processes of cultural and intellectual transfer. east Central europe exported millions of people to other parts of europe and the globe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With these people, it exported ideas, cultural practices, political movements, and legal norms. and of course, thanks to return migration (460,000 citizens of austria-Hungary returned to the empire from the United States between 1907 and 1914 alone), influence moved in both directions. 17 although these examples all fit within the rubric of transnational history, transnationalism is no promised land for historians. The Pompidou exhibit is a case in point. aside from the obvious linguistic and logistical challenges of transnational history (in a field that has plenty of linguistic challenges already), there is the danger of losing 790 east european Politics and Societies sight of local, regional, and national specificity. In addition, transnational and international histories can easily neglect the social and cultural dimensions of historical change. The broader the geographic scope of a study, the more countries involved, the more it tends to focus on high politics and elites. Historians still face the challenge of bringing together international or transnational history and social and cultural history. Finally, transnational history, like comparative history, carries the danger of assuming the nation as its starting point-a particular danger in our field. But in spite of these challenges, we have much to gain from deeper conversation with our colleagues in german and West european history. going West (or even global) is not the only viable or productive strategy to rescue eastern europe from the tropes of violence, nationalism, and backwardness; but it is one that might offer some interesting new perspectives on both eastern europe and europe as a whole.